It begins in a “Road Warrior” hellscape, a desert borderland where gasoline is smuggled in a high stakes game of chicken with the authorities of two countries added to the danger of carelessly transporting an explosively flammable substance.
We meet a “Fast and Furious” gang (“family”) driving ancients Detroit beaters, pickups and motorbikes undertaking this deadly enterprise.
Set on the 2012 Colombian/Venezuelan border, “Pimpinero: Blood and Oil” opens with great promise and tasty action picture possibilities before running out of gas in the middle acts as it shifts point of view and stumbles towards the even deadlier prospects of its finale.
Colombian director and co-writer Andrés Baiz was seriously onto something right up to the moment he wasn’t. “Pimpinero,” which takes its title from the Latin drum the various characters are “dancing” to in this criminal conspiracy thriller, is less than the sum of its possibilities.
The Estrada brothers — Moises, Ulises and Juan (Juanes, Alberto Guerra and Alejandro Speitzer) — lead a “clan” of smugglers taking advantage of the world’s cheapest gas prices (in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela) by hauling fuel in jerry cans and liter bottles through the “trails” across the most desolate corner of the border. Gas is 60 times higher in the cartel-crushed Colombian economy, and even a soft drink bottle’s worth has profit in it.
They make their hauls in assorted ’70s and ’80s Yank Tanks — an aged Impala, a rusting “Starsky & Hutch” vintage Torino, pickups.
But their rival Don Carmelo (David Noreña) plays dirty. And when they match his sabotage with a ratting-out of their own, it just gets people killed. The Estrada gang breaks up, sells-out or gives up the ghost.
Except for handsome Juan. He’s got a beautiful, gas-vending girlfriend (Laura Osma) with dreams of sex “on the beach,” and not just the cocktail version. Diana talks him into “one or two last runs” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English). As she is the daughter of some infamous character named “El Loco,” of course she knows how to drive. And shoot.
Chavez closes the border, and with Venezuelan and Colombian military and police crawling over the place, the game turns even more dangerous. There are debts to be paid, deals to be made and compromises that won’t sit well with hotheaded Juan.
He will be tested, as will Diana. Blood ties, old family connections, narrow escapes and disheartening captures clutter up the middle acts as the film’s plot shifts, different characters take the lead and there’s less about this “world” and more about the generic “What is the cinema most obsessed about smuggling now?”
The film’s introductory scenes promise chases and stunts and violence that are rarely served up in the movie to follow. We’re immersed in a black market of illicit gas, government collusion, human trafficking and cockfighting where “family” is supposed to matter, but doesn’t.
Baiz kind of loses his way when he makes this less about the characters he’s spent time making us invest in and more about plot twists that fall flat.
Lawless borderlands have been a great setting for fiction since storytelling began, and plenty of classic cinema uses this as its milieu, from “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” to assorted Asian and Southeast Asian free-for-alls to the “Mad Max” movies. The world set up in “Pimpinero” begs to be explored.
That was the movie I found myself wanting to see, tossing a “Fast and Furious” crew into lawless country run by smugglers, law enforcement, smuggler-robbing “pirates” (on bikes) and the like. Anything less was sure to disappoint, after the rowdy opening scenes. And “anything less” was what Baiz, unfortunately, is hellbent on delivering.
Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Alejandro Speitzer, Laura Osma, Alberto Guerra, Juanes, Norberto Rivera and
David Noreña
Credits: Directed by Andrés Baiz, scripted by
Maria Camila Arias and Andrés Baiz. An MGM/Amazon release on Prime.
Running time: 2:02
